Escaped The Trap

The Big Ten basketball schedule comes at you pretty fast. With apologies to Ferris Bueller, in no way should you stop and look around once in a while. The better advice - especially in January - is to keep looking forward. You lay a historic beat down on #9 Oregon on a Thursday and the reward is another road game at Washington on Sunday.

Thursday night’s historic beat down of the Ducks was as fun as it gets. The post game internet vibes were sky high across Illini Nation and I consumed as much Illinois talk as I could find from the national basketball media. The performance raised many an eyebrow across the college hoops landscape, and it also painted a bulls-eye squarely on this team’s back.

With a loss in Seattle today, the narrative from the weekend would be that the Oregon performance was a one-off. Just a night where a team got unsustainably hot from the arc. But with a win you come home from the West Coast with a tidy 2-0 sweep - something that most Big Ten teams will find difficult to do - and the evisceration in Eugene is fully validated.